Final Fantasy X | X-2 HD Review

I am a huge Final Fantasy fan and have been since playing my first on SNES, Final Fantasy 3 (Officially Final Fantasy 6) but there are quite a few games I missed so I am going back to play and beat them. One of which has been Remastered in HD. I will be reviewing both games as a package.

Final Fantasy X and X-2 are quite different from each other. Both share the same connecting world and a few main characters but can be easily identified from one another. I know its not fair to have NOW thoughts on games of the past that had limited technology to make the game but I have no choice because I am playing it on a NOW console. I will start off with...

Final Fantasy X.

Final Fantasy X was probably the last game in the series to keep with a traditional turn based style combat system, a system I grown to love and wish they had just stuck with instead of the many horrid experiments’ that would follow (I am looking at you, shitty paradigm System!) But would be the staple in very complex story telling from the series. Going beyond the “We need to save the Kingdom” Narrative it has become a crazy world in which is almost impossible to fathom living in. You take control of a character who has been washed away from his home city and wakes up on a shore only to find out he’s about 1000 years in the future. The story moves on from this craziness and continues to unfold on your journey as you try to piece together where you are and what happened to the place you once called home. This games story is crazy all the way up to the end but I was kind of taken back by the world after it was all said and done. It was a place that never gave up hope in the face of utter destruction.

The game play will have you questing and joining new people on your journey. The game introduces Overdrives, an attack that sounds like it should do some damage but doesn’t really. Summoning is back but even this doesn’t seem to give you an edge like past games. I feel they put all this stuff and then nerfed it before the game was released in fear that it made it too easy. If that’s the case, fair enough as the game itself isn’t all that challenging, but I don’t play Final Fantasy games for a challenge anyway.

Now I will talk about the games worst feature aside from the whiny voice acting. BLITZ BALL! Fuck this stupid mini game, it sucks, it’s a dumb waste of time. Just a game about random stats you have very little control of. Luckily I only had to sit through one game, I set it to auto pilot and made dinner as it played in the background.Overall I felt it was a fun adventure. Not close to my favorite Final Fantasy experience’s but I don’t feel like I wasted my time ether.

Now let’s cover Final Fantasy X-2.

I was actually looking forward to this one because I didn’t hear anything about it and wanted to see how X continues. Unfortunately, they tried too hard to make this into a completely different game. I feel all the new mechanics were just experiments gone wrong.

They evolved the class based game play of older titles and thought making them over complex would add a new level of gameplay but only adds a new level of frustration. They branch out to so many classes, which are called dresses, and its almost impossible to focus on one because of how the game is designed. By the end I would just use the secrete dresses because they would stage off dying better. It was a lot more work then playing to me. The Pokémon System they tried to shoe horn into the game just further complicated the game to the point where you couldn’t keep track of your team. In RPG games your party is suppose to be the main protogenos in the game not random monsters and stuff.The story was what kept me going. I needed to know how it would go on and was very disappointed with how everything turned out in the end. One thing I did like was the whole Girl Power thing they where doing. You don’t see enough of it in games (Now the whole Dress Class makes sense huh?). Overall It was a mess of a plot with no Climax.Ultimately I am surprised I made it the whole way through and could have gone the rest of my life pretending this game didn’t exist so for the most part I will do just that.

So as a complete package I feel all this game had was Final Fantasy X. It didn’t need to pack X-2 and I feel its just there so they could sell it for more or to appeal to those 2 guys that actually liked it. I can’t recommend this game at full price, maybe if you see it for $10 or something and are curious other then that there are a lot better games to play.